Mo Said She Was Quirky by James Kelman: review

Tim Martin on Mo Said She Was Quirky, one of James Kelman's most
accessible and least interesting novels.

James Joyce’s observation that “a writer should never write about the extraordinary; that is for the journalist” casts a long shadow over the work of James Kelman. Since Not Not While the Giro in 1983, Kelman’s novels and stories have maintained a stolid distance from the easy conventions of mainstream fiction, submerging plot, setting and occasionally intelligibility in the digressive monologues of their working-class protagonists.

To his admirers this makes Kelman the last British Modernist, a writer whose apparent refusal of literary falsehood masks a correspondingly deep level of craft. His focus on the minute experiences of the downtrodden and the marginal, they argue, is not just a political statement but a test of the formal and linguistic limits of narrative. Opinions on the other side have mostly changed for the better since How Late It Was, How Late won the Booker in 1994 and was greeted as “crap” or the work of an “illiterate savage”, but to Kelman’s critics, these forbiddingly angry, anxious, rambling and convoluted projects can often resemble tests of endurance instead of brave experiments.

Mo Said She Was Quirky, Kelman’s excellently titled eighth novel, seems hardly fated to settle the debate on either side. It's both one of his most accessible books and one of his least interesting, with the advertised departures from its author’s supposed comfort zone (it has a female protagonist and a London setting) counting for surprisingly little against a voice and a structure that are even more attenuated than usual. The protagonist, Helen, is a Glaswegian single mother who lives with her British-Pakistani boyfriend Mo and her six-year-old daughter in a tiny flat in the London urban sprawl, moonlighting on punishing shifts at an all-night casino. Kelman’s book follows her interior monologue for 24 hours as she sleeps, wakes and half-dozes through memories, dreams and reflections. If Kelman’s portrayal of childhood in his last novel Kieron Smith, Boy seemed to offer more than a nod to the opening of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist, this circular monologue has obvious echoes of Molly Bloom.

But Kelman’s Helen is infinitely less serene than Joyce’s bawdy Madonna. Self-castigating, anxious, withdrawn and “a champion sigher”, she exists in a state of perpetual worry. Kelman gives us her thoughts as she might speak them, which means that she, and the reader, end up imprisoned in a cage of strangulated locutions, prophylactic repetitions and stock phrases. “She was worse than silly. What was worse than silly? She was.”

Long-time readers of Kelman will notice a similarity here to parts of his previous novel, whose protagonist was not a 28-year-old mother but a pre-adolescent boy. Nor is this the only way in which the book seems to lack the thrum of authorial energy that underlies Kelman’s work at its best. His notorious interest in the power-games of dialect and punctuation is here reduced to some apparently reasonless quibbling: he seems to have taken against the apostrophe of contraction but doesn't mind the possessive version, leaving the mysterious divisions to collide endlessly in sentences like “It should have been water off a duck’s back but it wasnt”. Meanwhile, Helen’s use of concertedly anodyne intensifiers (“so unfair, so so unfair”) comes to seem less an adventurous thesis on linguistic relativity than an authorial tic of its own.

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The political virtues of the novel, in fact, are rather more convincing than the actual experience of reading it. Kelman has chosen to tell a story from the point of view of a powerless actor, a woman half-adrift in the metropolis whose vocabulary has been colonised by water-cooler commonplaces and whose obsessions revolve around financial and personal inadequacy, male domination and the difficulty of making ends meet. This is hardly well-trodden ground for contemporary fiction; certainly not fiction with the iron construction, stringency and stealthy understanding that Kelman brings to it. Set against Martin Amis’s Lionel Asbo, a book-long sneer on the underclass dressed up in Nabokovian tatters, its sympathetic virtues are evident: perceptively, nothing in that book comes remotely close to Helen’s wish to “experience something like a real freedom, a real one; and they could choose how life was to be instead of having it forced on them all the time?” Admirers of Kelman will find their reserves of patience taxed more than usual here, but ultimately rewarded. Opponents will find that this one flies dangerously close to boredom. Plus ça change.